


In Another World

by StoryWitch



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Pining, Unrequited Crush, Unrequited Love, Wistful
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-20
Updated: 2020-05-20
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:15:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24289558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StoryWitch/pseuds/StoryWitch
Summary: It was just a fleeting crush, Nott told Beau in their heart-to-heart at the Evening Nip. But Nott has spent her whole life downplaying her own desires.
Relationships: Nott/Caleb Widogast, Veth Brenatto/Caleb Widogast
Comments: 3
Kudos: 51





	In Another World

Nott never meant to say it out loud. But then she and Beau got into the habit of swapping secrets. It had been a secret so long that she was bursting with it, but even when she let it out, she made it smaller. So much smaller than it was.

That was what she did with the things she wanted. Especially the ones she _should not want._ She concealed them entirely, or else she made them _smaller,_ made them insignificant, made them jokes.

That was what she had done to herself.

“But when I was in that prison cell with Widogast over there, for the first few days, I was kind of attracted to him.”

_Kind of attracted._

_The first few days._

“I just saw him one night, sort of trying to look out the window, the moonlight was hitting his face, and he was very handsome.”

_“He is handsome,”_ she’d told Keg back in Shadycreek Run, _“and he could do so much better than a little freak show like me. He could meet any girl in town and sweep her off her feet.”_

They’d shared a bed or a tent every night for months. Curled against each other for warmth and comfort. But it was all right, because it wasn’t like _that_ between them. She was his mother, his daughter, his little sister–anything but the one thing that had flitted through her mind in the prison cell that night and never entirely faded.

“Had a little bit of a crush. But then I got to know him.”

_“…and you know, I care for you deeply now, and I wouldn’t leave your side for anything, but…I mean, I love you.”_

“Well, I mean, I’m also married, happily married…”

_She had been happy. She **had** been. They had filled her world entirely, her husband and son. But she was so much…smaller then._

“…but I will say I haven’t looked at another man other than my husband quite like that. He’s very exciting.”

_“I ditched my husband in a den of monsters to go adventuring with you.”_

Beauregard was a monk of the Cobalt Soul. They collected secrets, as Nott understood it, the way she collected buttons and rings and other shiny trinkets. But there was another tenet to their philosophy: Information was meant to be shared. Secrets revealed, impostors unmasked. But Nott wasn’t sure which of her faces was the mask anymore, which of her names rang true. It was the goblin heart that held perverse desires, held them close and did not want to let them go. It was the goblin also (she could not forget) who called herself “Brave.”

It was the goblin who loved him (so she decided). Only the goblin. And when she was herself again–mother, wife, simple country peasant with simple wants and needs–that love would take flight like the fancy it was, and she would be pure again, would be clean of it, would forget how it had kept her warm at night.

That is why she kisses him now. In the final moment with her mask still on. Her last moment as this ugly, messy, daring creature who does not really count, who is not really _real._ The final dizzying dance in a wild masquerade.

_“In another world, maybe.”_

_“Yeah, another time, another place.”_

He meant to bend reality to his will. That was what he’d told them once–Beauregard and Nott–the collector of secrets and the living secret, the unmasker and the masked. _He can change me,_ Nott thought then, but she didn’t mean like this. _He can bend the rules of space and time._ But maybe part of her wondered, even then, whether somewhere in the infinite timelines he would someday find at his fingertips, in the infinite trajectories that unfurled before her eyes when she gazed into the beacon, there was a place for a very great wizard and a very small halfling (goblin?) to be more to each other than placeholders for the old lives they’d lost, the old loves they sought to regain.

_“I don’t know if I’ll…I mean, I won’t_ look _the same, obviously, but I don’t know if I’ll…think…the same about you all.”_

Maybe the true reason she kisses him now is because she remembers her fairy tales. A cursed princess is always saved by true love’s kiss.

And maybe it is a punishment for that wicked goblin thought, when the clay shatters, when the magic disperses like shards of broken glass, when that terrible laugh fills the chamber where her new family has gathered to love her and save her and make her real again.

Maybe that is why she finds herself blinking tear-blind eyes, goblin eyes, gazing broken and terrified into the face of temptation and salvation, at the lips she has kissed and cannot unkiss.

“ _I’ve had all sorts of different…feelings and things happen to me since becoming this form, and I don’t know what’s what anymore. It all feels…I don’t know,_ normal _now.”_

Or maybe she has done this to herself. By not wishing hard enough. Maybe something is holding her back. Maybe the Mighty Nein are living in a different kind of fairy tale. About finding yourself at the heart of the labyrinth you were lost in. About monsters loving monsters and looking unflinching upon each other’s hearts.

_“I guess the thing I’m most scared of is…if I change…I won’t want to stay.”_

The dust is settling. The spell has failed. She is not uncursed, but she _is_ unmasked. And she does not know what to do with her secret when it meets the light of day. There is no renouncing it, no shedding it with her monster face and her monster heart. She cannot have what she wants (she’s _always_ known that), but maybe she can want it just a little bit longer.

_“Thank you, Caleb, for getting me this far, and for devoting yourself to…to me. You’re a good man, and I…I hope you find where you’re going, too.”_

She can pretend a little bit longer that she is walking one of those other paths she glimpsed in the beacon. An unknown path, poorly traveled, poorly lit, but a path of adventure and excitement. One that Veth Brenatto would never dare to tread. One that leads to a reward that only Nott the Brave would ever seek.

Just a little bit longer before she goes home and closes that door behind her.

_In another world, maybe._

_In another world._


End file.
